“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will allow my fear to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone I will turn my inner eye to see its path. And where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – From Frank Herbert’s “Dune”

We all have fears – that gripping sensation you feel when the possibility of a negative outcome enters your peripheral vision. You may fear something entirely different from me, but that sensation is shared. Fear can motivate us or petrify us. Some fears are common – fear of death, fear of illness, fear of hunger etc. But in modern civilization where the world runs on money, few fears rise higher in the ranks than the fear of poverty. Today I’m going to get a little personal and share with you my greatest financial fear.

My Background

A bit of background about me – I am a Chinese immigrant. I grew up in the biggest city in the northeast most province of China called Harbin. It’s a little bigger than Chicago by population size. Anywhere else in the world it would be considered a huge metro, but in China it’s just a regular sized city. My parents were well-educated professionals and very well compensated compared to their peers. So even though I grew up during a relatively impoverished period in Chinese economic history, I never knew what it was like to go hungry. In fact, mine was one of the very first private households in the entire city to get a telephone.

When we first arrived in the United States, my family came as illegal immigrants. So I had a drastically different experience. As a child, I remember driving in a car without air conditioning, raiding the trash at the local thrift store for clothes and moving from an apartment into someone’s basement to save on rent. Still I never went hungry – my mother worked at several local Chinese restaurants so there were always leftovers. What’s my point? I’ve known what it’s like to be poor, although not poor enough to be homeless or go hungry.

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Dr. Bo Liu is an aspiring radiologist-in-training and the founder and editor of the White Coat Money Blog. He has an interest in interventional radiology and helping his medical colleagues get ahead in this mad world of medicine and money. When he's not crushing the list at the PACS station or typing up your next favorite blog post, you can usually find him at the local badminton club, movie theater or the most recently opened restaurant.

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